Tom Coburn

"In any election,” Tom Coburn often says, “you should vote for the candidate who will give up the most if they win.” All things being equal, we should prefer politicians who have accomplished something in their lives beyond government work—and who are willing to sacrifice it, at least temporarily, to serve the country at a cost to their convenience and comfort. During his 6 years in the House of Representatives and 10 more in the Senate, Coburn has embodied his own principle. He went to medical school after a successful career in business and became an obstetrician when he was 35. He built a lucrative practice in his hometown of Muskogee, Oklahoma. He waited until he was 46 to seek public office, after he’d delivered 4,000 babies. First things first.

Coburn retires from the Senate at the end of this Congress, and we’ll miss him. His résumé makes him an increasingly rare bird in the Washington aviary. Among “antigovernment” Republicans no less than Leviathan-loving liberals, our political ranks brim over with men and women whose careers began in second grade with their first campaign for hall monitor and went on from there, with perhaps a brief detour to law school offering them their closest view of the push and pull of normal commercial life. Coburn calls himself a “citizen legislator,” and the archaic title fits. Single-handed, he restored the phrase “public service” to good repute in Washington, at least for his admirers.

He’s done so by being a pest. This is the kindest word we can come up with, though enemies both in and of out of his party prefer surlier tags like crank and headcase. Coburn commandeered every parliamentary maneuver available to a lone senator and used his mastery to slow the Senate down and draw attention to the untoward details of business-as-usual: absurd expenditures, cheap favors for the well-to-do, presidential appointments for dolts and clowns, and every imaginable accounting trick in service of parochial rather than national interests, all of it undertaken on borrowed money. His endless amendments and points of order became a kind of shaming, directed at people who long ago abandoned shame. Coburn trained an outsider’s eye on the work of insiders and delivered the news, usually bad. “If we applied the same standards to Congress that we apply to Enron,” he once said of congressional book-juggling, “everybody here would go to jail.”

But he’s also a gentleman. Much of Coburn’s appeal lies in an apparently bottomless insouciance. (He once mentioned that he was well into college before he even heard of marijuana, which proves that Merle Haggard was right: They really didn’t smoke it in Muskogee.) In his most passionate moments he seemed baffled that the workings of politics and government don’t operate disinterestedly and out in the open, for all to see, as the Founders intended. He spent a fair amount of time in his farewell speech offering apologies. “To those of you through the years whom I have offended, I truly apologize,” he said, though even the sincerest apology couldn’t make him cross his view of the Constitution. “I believe the enumerated powers meant something,” he went on. “When I have offended, I believe it has been on the basis of my belief in Article I, Section 8.” That’s the section listing the things Congress is permitted by the Constitution to do. Senators might want to get staff to look it up.

A pest and a gentleman and a man of firm principle—but not an ideologue, the off-the-shelf epithet tossed at him by a ditzy press and exasperated colleagues. His pragmatism is another reason he was always worth paying attention to. The lack of ideological rigidity most often served to expose the rigidity of others. When he sponsored a bill to cut agriculture subsidies to people who make more than $1 million a year, he was blocked by the same Democrats who complain that millionaires are undertaxed. When he grudgingly supported the timid tax increases in the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction proposal, he was disparaged by Republicans who say our debt is a form of national suicide—but nothing to raise taxes over. Most of the time he was asking his colleagues to put their money where their mouths were. And no one ever caught him in double-dealing or hypocrisy. That cut in agriculture subsidies, for example: It applied to millionaires in Oklahoma too. They voted for him anyway.

After his farewell speech, his fellow senators gave Coburn a standing ovation. We join his countless admirers in the general applause, but we can’t help but wonder: Were the senators cheering his speech or his decision to retire and—finally—leave them alone?

Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma delivered his farewell address to the U.S. Senate Thursday. An emotional Coburn thanked the staff of the Senate and the U.S. Capitol before delivering an assessment of the state of the Congress and of the country. Watch the video below:

One Republican candidate hoping to replace Oklahoma's Tom Coburn in the U.S. Senate is out with a new ad introducing himself to voters statewide. T.W. Shannon, the 35-year former speaker of the state house, has a 60-second television spot highlighting his biography as a "sixth-generation Oklahoman" who is "guided by his faith" and instilling the values of his parents and grandparents in his own children.

As Bill Kristol and Jeff Anderson noted earlier today, the introduction by Republican Senators Burr, Coburn, and Hatch of an Obamacare replacement plan is an important milestone in the health care debate. This is a serious and practical replacement proposal, offered by three prominent legislators. It could easily serve as the starting point for a legislative effort, perhaps even next year if Republicans regain control of the Senate, to undo Obamacare and replace it with something far better.

UPDATE: Coburn's spokesman called to say that his boss was joking. Says the spokesman, “Dr. Coburn was poking fun at himself and the focus on presidential politics and rivalries three years ahead of the next election. The exchange characterized below was a joke – it didn’t happen in real life …” The full text of the speech is bellow. The post is updated to reflect this fact.

This afternoon Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) unveiled his own proposal to reduce to deficit. The plan, which purports to reduce the deficit by over $9 trillion over the next decade, does so by cutting discretionary spending and entitlements as well as by raising some revenue and counting savings on interest payments. Included among Coburn’s cuts is over $1 trillion from the Department of Defense budget.

“It’s specific, it’s detailed, it makes hard choices,” said Coburn in a press conference at the Capitol. “But it’s necessary.”

Is Newt Gingrich getting out? Could be—or maybe you don’t need a staff to run. Is Rick Perry getting in? Why not? Who else combines governing success and Tea Party credibility? What about Rudy Giuliani? He apparently intends to see whether the second time’s a charm. In the Senate Dining Room, John Thune’s getting encouragement to reconsider from some of his colleagues, while Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are conferring to see if one of them should carry the deficit hawk banner.

Earmark debate pits Coburn against Inhofe.

The proposed earmark moratorium that the Republican Senate caucus will vote on tomorrow has pitted Oklahoma's two conservative senators against one another. "Republicans can send a signal that they get it," earmark opponent Tom Coburn tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. "Or they can send a signal that they continue to not get it and say they're not going to change.